While boarding my flight to Madrid yesterday evening, about 2/3 of the people on the plane seemed to be heading to Madrid for either the TechEd or the SAPPHIRE now, looking eager to learn a lot about new trends, products and solutions provided by SAP and its Partners. This morning I saw many fellow flyers again at the conference center. So what are the big trends at this year’s TechEd?

Improved BI solutions enabling easier and faster projects

2011 has been an exciting year so far, with many new releases and new products being available to customers. There’s the new Business Objects BI4.0 release, bringing new frontend tools (Analysis, formerly known as Pioneer), a new platform and improved SAP integration into the playing field, plus enhanced mobile solutions for analytics. We at itelligence are very excited about the new possibilities and the new features that the tool stack is offering. The combination of BI4.0 with the new BW release 7.3 creates great opportunities to improve BI solutions and make BI projects easier and faster. The new semantic partitioned objects (SPO), graphical data flow design tools, data flow migration tools and the enhanced and improved administration tools prove to be really beneficial for customers. Many sessions at the TechEd cover this area in detail.

HANA- the future is now

But the next real bug thing that SAP has released is HANA, the High Performance Analytical Appliance, combining the the leading technological approach of Sybase’s column based database with the speed of the in memory technology. This takes Business Analytics to a completely new level and both SAP and the partner ecosystem agree, that HANA is a real game changer eliminating problems that we have been facing on many projects across all industries and client sizes, real time, extremely fast reporting off mass data for example. Leveraging HANA we are able to solve many of the challenges of the past. However, this is just the starting point, the HANA roadmap gives us an idea of what will happen in the future:

— HANA as underlying technology for SAP BW
— HANA as the single database for all appliances, such as ERP, CRM, BW, etc.

And the future is now! SAP announced today that the new BW7.3 SP5 in combination with HANA SP3 has been made available for ramp up customers yesterday, just before the start of the TechEd. What does this mean? HANA as the database for BW has become reality and we’re one step closer to what SAP referred to as the HANA Nirvana today — the single application for all business requirements running in memory on HANA technology!

It has been a very exciting day here in Madrid and I am looking forward to the next two days filled with exciting workshops and hands on sessions. I’ll keep you posted!